The Killing

While I'm at it, I suppose I should just say a word or two about The Killing. I seem to recall Kubrick hating this movie, but that might be me confusing it with Spartacus. Which you'd think is pretty fucking hard to do. In any event, The Killing is an odd-duck of a movie. It manages to be pretty damn close to what Kubrick would do in Strangelove and Clockwork, while still being a lesser work. The big downfall is the weird pulp noir voice over that more or less evaporates by the end of the first hour. It's like someone mixed up the first few reels with the audio from Dragnet.

Once you get past that, you get something that's pretty atypical for Kubrick, an extremely tight, tense, and suspenseful caper picture. It really has the feeling that Ocean's Eleven (the Soderbergh one) tries and (in my opinion) fails to accomplish. Utter fucking chaos, where there's only one or two guys smarter than the room. It's interesting mostly to me because despite fitting snugly into the cliches and devices of Noir, it manages to be a wholly different beast. Hell, it's almost an action movie, save for the lack of flat-out action scenes.

It's one of those movies that a lot of Kubrick fans seem to overlook, and, considering the style and form he gained just a few years later in Strangelove and beyond, I suppose it's understandable. That being said, it's a helluva lot of fun, which is not something one often hears when describing Kubrick movies.